A coup in Africa is another quiet embarrassment for the US military's most idealistic mission

• For years, US troops have deployed around the world to train and advise foreign forces.
• These train-and-equip programs start with lofty goals, but they often fail and have unintended consequences.
• Robert Moore is a public policy advisor for Defense Priorities and former Capitol Hill staffer.

As American leaders scramble to understand and cast blame following the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and its US-trained military before the Taliban last month, another US-supported foreign military force recently made headlines for the wrong reasons.

A small special forces group in the African country of Guinea reportedly initiated a coup and overthrew the government on their day off from training with American special forces who were being hosted in the country.

There was no large-scale evacuation of civilians or US forces like in Kabul; in fact, a vast majority of Americans likely had no idea that their military has been involved in Guinea at all. But all the same, it is another embarrassment for the US leadership class that has built decades-worth of policies and careers attempting to use American power to create and sustain new democracies throughout the world.

As Task and Purpose points out in reporting the story, this is not the first time a group of US-trained military personnel have interfered with their respective governments.

But this is the first time such forces have initiated a coup against the very government that was hosting US trainers while the trainers were there. American forces had no authority or business interfering, and immediately retreated to the US embassy with no harm reported.

It doesn't take a military expert to see how it could have been much worse for the US trainers, and the American public again needs answers to understand how our national security and intelligence agencies gravely miscalculated the capabilities and intentions of the forces we were supporting.

While this coup may be unique in the history of US training missions, our recent track record of supporting foreign militaries and non-state militants is riddled with failures and unintended consequences.

Beyond the recent collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, which left billions of dollars worth of US military equipment in the hands of militants we had been fighting for two decades, the War on Terror in other parts of the Middle East and Africa has a similar pattern of results.

Some of the resistance forces we armed and supported in Syria at the outset of their civil war had connections to extremist groups, were accused of committing war crimes, or ended up fighting each other as was reported in 2016.

US-backed forces in Libya helped to topple dictator Moammar Ghaddafi in 2011 but have abetted in keeping that country mired in civil conflict for the last decade, becoming a breeding ground for extremist groups and accelerating the European refugee crisis.

The American government supports our Saudi Arabian allies with billions of dollars in military equipment and support every year in the name of counter-terrorism, which enables the Saudi's long-running antagonism in the Yemeni Civil War and contributing to one of the world's largest humanitarian disasters.

Looking further back to the Cold War, there is a long list of train-and-equip failures ranging from the Bay of Pigs crisis in Cuba to arming the Mujahadeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, some of whom were the precursor to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

To be fair, there have been successes too, such as supporting the Colombian military against the FARC rebel group in recent decades. But counting winners and losers distracts from the more important concerns - why such foreign assistance programs exist and understanding if they support the core national-security interests of the United States.

Like many diplomatic and national security initiatives, our military partnerships and train and equip programs start from lofty goals - nurturing a fledgling democracy, enabling others to fight crime and terrorism, or expanding our influence and alliances.

This is seemingly attractive, especially to leaders in Washington who support this kind of liberal internationalism, and the programs are routinely approved by Congress with little debate or fanfare through broad departmental authorization bills.

But as we continue to see, proliferating democracy at the expense of US blood and treasure or supporting good governance in far-away lands often has little direct bearing on our actual national security interests even if successful - at worst, they pose a risk to US interests.

The likelihood that our country would ever face any security threat from Guinea, let alone an existential one, was significantly smaller than the risk we undertook by involving our military there for something as simple as a training mission.

The failures in Guinea, Afghanistan, and elsewhere should give the American public pause in allowing our leaders to continue such initiatives with foreign governments and militants, and refocus our power and funding on core national security interests.

Robert Moore is a public policy advisor for Defense Priorities. He previously worked for nearly a decade on Capitol Hill, most recently as the lead staff for Sen. Mike Lee on the Senate Armed Services Committee.